B2B Ecommerce Marketing: 11 Proven Channels and Strategies for 2026

Declining organic reach and increasing competition means customer acquisition costs are rising across the board. 

For business-to-business (B2B) ecommerce brands in particular, the stakes are even higher. Brands spend roughly 6.4% of their annual revenue promoting B2B products. By 2028, this is projected to exceed $135 billion—driven in part by the fact that 41% of B2B brands plan to increase their marketing budget over the coming year.

That shift has redefined what marketing success looks like. The strongest B2B ecommerce brands don’t just generate leads—they build connected digital journeys that guide entire buying teams from discovery to reorder.

This guide explores strategies that help businesses connect digital self-service with account-based marketing, unify data, and measure ROI across every channel.

What is B2B ecommerce marketing?

B2B ecommerce marketing describes how a company promotes its products to other businesses, rather than individual consumers. 

In 2026, effective programs will continue to balance traditional relationship-building with digital-first experiences. Tradeshows and in-person events that previously dominated the B2B marketing industry still matter, but they’ve been overtaken by digital channels like content, social media, and email. This reflects the fact that 56% of all B2B businesses’ revenue now comes from digital interactions, showing how quickly buying behavior has shifted. 

Understanding that evolution is key to seeing how B2B marketing differs from consumer marketing.

Key differences between B2B and B2C ecommerce marketing

Because business buyers behave differently from consumers, the marketing strategies must adapt: 

• Sales cycle: The B2B buying process is over four months long and involves around 10 stakeholders—each of whom communicate internally at different times. Your marketing plan needs to appease these varying demands simultaneously.
• Acquisition channels: B2B buyers value relationships with suppliers and usually opt for trusted resources like industry publications, professional networks like LinkedIn, and emails from shortlisted vendors. Direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands, however, typically aim to reach a large audience through more generalized channels like social media and influencer marketing. 
• Order size and frequency: Business customers tend to make repeat purchases as they value predictability from suppliers. As a result, buyers tend to be harder to acquire but easier to retain—provided you focus on retention in your B2B ecommerce marketing strategy. 

Despite these differences, one thing rings true across both B2B and DTC marketing: buyers want a connected experience across multiple channels. Per McKinsey, more than half of B2B buyers now seek a true omnichannel experience—where they can research, interact, and buy from B2B brands without disruption. 

Regardless of audience, buyers expect seamless engagement across every channel—and the brands that deliver it consistently see stronger return on investment (ROI) and customer retention.

Essential B2B ecommerce marketing channels

Gartner reports that high-growth B2B organizations leverage 17 marketing channels on average, compared to 15 from B2C. Here are some of the most popular. 

1. Content marketing and thought leadership

Strong B2B content educates buying teams, not just individuals. High-growth brands map content to each stakeholder’s needs, positioning themselves as trusted experts. The goal is to address challenges, answer key questions, and position your solution as the best fit. 

Your B2B website is one of the best places to house this content. Studies show that a supplier’s website is the second-most popular type of content that B2B buyers use to finalize purchasing decisions, beaten only by online reviews.

B2B beauty brand Dermalogica Canada does this with their Meaningful Connections blog. Retail partners, known as skin therapists, can take an online course designed to help strengthen their emotional intelligence and client communications. There’s also an eight-day social media challenge and Living Skin podcast—both of which help position the B2B brand as an authority in the space without being overly promotional. 

Once your content foundation is built, SEO ensures it reaches the right audience at the right time.

2. Search engine optimization (SEO) and organic discovery

Buyers spend the majority of their time conducting independent research online. Search engines like Google offer an advantage that other channels don’t: you can connect with potential customers when they’re actively searching for the products you offer. 

A solid understanding of your target audience underpins any B2B SEO strategy. Talk to existing buyers to find out:

• The pain points they’re experiencing
• When they head to Google, and what they’re looking for when they do
• Keywords and phrases they use 
• The type of content they consume (is it blog posts, podcasts, videos, or a combination?)

Once you’ve found the phrases your target audience searches for, group relevant phrases together and target them in a piece of content they’re most likely to consume. Opt for keywords that indicate commercial intent—for example, “best HVAC brands for apartment complexes” instead of “what is a HVAC system”—for maximum impact. 

Tip: As buyers become increasingly confident with generative AI, they’re using tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini in their purchasing research. One study found a significant overlap between traditional search results and Google’s AI Overviews—meaning SEO best practices still determine how—and whether—your business appears in these new AI experiences.

3. Social media marketing for B2B

Millennials are in the driving seat of most B2B purchases. Some 80% of this demographic consults social media for buying decisions. And they expect the same DTC-style experiences when buying on behalf of a business. 

Buyers consult Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram to learn about vendors—hence why social media topped the list of channels B2B marketers plan to invest in this year.

Take HVAC wholesaler Carrier, who uses Instagram to connect with prospective buyers. Wholesale partners would care about receiving high-quality products from a reputable manufacturer—both topics they cover in this video to celebrate manufacturing month:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Carrier (@carrier)

Influencer and partner marketing

Influencer marketing is a growing subsection of social media marketing that’s gaining traction in B2B. In one report, some 81% of B2B marketers intended to increase their influencer marketing budget, while 9% planned to introduce this type of strategy in 2025.

B2B influencer marketing works because buyers value relationships. Trust is required in any purchase decision when pressure to drive ROI is on the line. Influencers who are trusted in their industry pass this onto their partners by default.

Dermalogica, for instance, has an affiliate program as part of their B2B marketing strategy. Skin therapists who resell the brand’s products in their own salons earn a 30% commission when their customers make a purchase through its website—an incentive that can retain existing buyers while also increasing DTC revenue. 

4. Paid advertising and PPC campaigns

Paid advertising helps you reach decision-makers in target companies by paying to play. This channel was forecast to have the biggest growth of any B2B marketing or advertising strategy, with spending growing from $12 billion last year to $19 billion by 2028.

According to Dreamdata’s recent report, the Google Network—which includes Google Search, the Display Network, and YouTube—accounts for more than half of the average B2B brand’s advertising budget. However, LinkedIn has a considerably lower cost per influenced company, making it a strong choice for enterprise targeting. 

Though you can go broad with paid advertising campaigns (for example, targeting competitor’s brand names through Google Ads), retargeting tends to be the most effective approach. Most ad platforms allow you to import customer lists or use web-based pixels to display personalized ad creatives that reflect the products or content they’ve viewed. 

When managed strategically and connected to customer relationship management (CRM) data, paid campaigns don’t just drive traffic—they accelerate pipeline velocity and reinforce other marketing channels through consistent brand visibility.

5. Email marketing and automation

B2B buyers need to know they can trust vendors to supply high-quality products, on budget, and on time. Email marketing helps nurture those customer relationships, which were once managed entirely through in-person sales at tradeshows and events.

Unlike social media, where an average post on platforms like LinkedIn reaches just 3.7% of your audience, emails have an average open rate of 37.93%. Campaigns land in the inbox they use every day for work—hence why email is the preferred marketing channel for 73% of B2B marketers. 

A strong B2B email marketing strategy includes three elements: 

1. Customer data collection: Give prospects an incentive to share their email address, whether that’s a gated report or virtual workshops. Enrich these signup forms with additional fields, such as job title or company size. Buyers are twice as likely to share data when it leads to the personalized interactions they want.
2. Segment your audience: Divide subscribers into groups based on traits they share, using first-party data you’ve collected on them. This can include products they’ve bought, firmographic data they share, or behavioral traits they’ve shown. 
3. Personalized email content: Tailor messages to each segment’s needs.For example, smaller accounts might focus on cost savings and financing options, while enterprise brands lean into scalability and dedicated account management. 

Tip: Shopify creates a unified customer profile each time a prospective buyer shares their email address or phone number with your business. Any supplementary data—collected through native Shopify features or integrated apps such as Klaviyo—feeds back to this unified profile for a 360-degree view of your buyers. Use this in conjunction with Shopify’s segmentation functionality to personalize the experience for every buyer. 

6. Account-based marketing (ABM) program

Account-based marketing (ABM) focuses on a specific set of accounts instead of targeting broad audiences. It relies on lead nurturing and scoring to identify priority accounts and pair them with personalized outreach that reflects their stage of the B2B customer journey.

For example, a B2B furniture brand might assign greater weight to warm leads in their CRM who have requested a quote or downloaded a product catalog. 

An ABM campaign would retarget those prospects through paid ads and email marketing with personalized messaging that reflects previous conversations. Those who visited high-value product pages multiple times, for instance, might receive a tailored offer or an invitation to book a design consultation.

Per Forrester, ABM campaigns deliver 21% to 50% higher return on investment than traditional marketing channels. This reflects what matters most when selecting a B2B vendor: 85% of stakeholders believe an understanding of their business’s challenges and needs is top priority, compared to just 41% who’d opt for the vendor perceived to be the “safest choice.”

Once you’ve defined your target accounts and approach, the next step is turning those insights into a scalable, measurable strategy that connects systems across your organization.

Building your B2B ecommerce marketing strategy

7. Define your ideal customer profile (ICP)

Targeted marketing campaigns make a customer feel heard and seen. That’s only possible with a thorough understanding of who they are, what they’re looking for, and the problems they’re trying to solve.

Look in your CRM, interview your sales team, and analyze purchase data to identify your best customers. What traits—whether that’s their industry, job title, company size, acquisition channel, pain point, or buying motivations—do they have in common? Detail these in an ideal customer profile (ICP), also known as a buyer persona, to reference when building out campaigns. 

Your ICP forms the foundation for both account-based marketing and personalization at scale. By understanding who delivers the most long-term value, you can focus resources on the relationships most likely to grow profitably.

8. Outline the sales funnel with customer journey maps

Use customer data mapping to identify what touchpoints the average buyer makes at each stage of this sales funnel. This allows you to create a B2B marketing strategy that addresses their pain points, reinforces purchase motivations, and guides them toward the next step. 

Here’s what that might look like for a fitness equipment wholesaler:

1. Awareness: Buyers search top-funnel keywords (such as “gym business equipment list”) and browse equipment manufacturers on social media. Create blog content and social media videos to attract them and highlight their pain points. 
2. Interest: Buyers are researching solutions but they haven’t identified vendors yet. Reach them with industry reports, quizzes, and blog content to target long-tail phrases (for example, “How to choose a commercial treadmill”).
3. Consideration: At this point, buyers are shortlisting vendors and preparing to talk to stakeholders. Assist them with comparison articles and case studies promoted through personalized emails and retargeted PPC campaigns. 
4. Evaluation: Encourage buyers to complete the purchase with testimonials, quotes, and free product demonstrations. 

Tip: Buyer motivations differ greatly from DTC, where the end consumer typically has a short sales cycle to solve a personal goal. In B2B ecommerce, buyers want to know they’re getting ROI on every purchase. This greater pressure to drive revenue is a powerful lever to pull on in B2B ecommerce marketing campaigns. 

9. Align sales and marketing teams

Although the majority of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free experience, McKinsey estimates that roughly one-third of them will contact a sales rep at some stage in the buying journey. 

The handover from marketing to sales needs to feel seamless. If marketing runs a campaign to promote bulk order discounts, for example, B2B sales teams should sell the same offer, leaving out any other incentives to offer a seamless transition between both departments.

This is made possible by aligning both teams before any campaign goes live. Both teams should agree on:

• Buyer personas
• Messaging and positioning
• Product specifications
• Pricing strategies, including promotions
• Lead qualification criteria

When sales and marketing work from a shared system of record—supported by unified data—each team can deliver consistent messaging, manage leads efficiently, and convert opportunities faster.

B2B ecommerce marketing tactics that drive results

10. Omnichannel personalization

The millennials who drive B2B purchasing decisions have become accustomed to omnichannel shopping—the ability to seamlessly switch between channels throughout the customer journey. They expect the same level of relevance when buying on behalf of their businesses. 

Meeting that expectation means going beyond being active on the marketing channels they’re using. Brands need to create a cohesive, data-driven experience across each touchpoint. And buyers are willing to walk away if that expectation goes unmet. 

A unified commerce strategy enables this omnichannel B2B personalization at scale by creating a single commerce operating system. Inventory, order, and customer data flow to one platform in real time, without patchy middleware and costly custom integrations typically required to sell omnichannel. 

Brooklinen is just one retailer using Shopify’s unified commerce platform to streamline operations for B2B and DTC selling from one unified back end—an approach their team credits with helping them personalize outreach for wholesale ecommerce buyers.

“Now, we can see that a large hospitality group purchased from us six months ago,” says Kelly Hallinan, Brooklinen’s SVP of emerging channels. “We know the average amount of time in between orders, and we can say, ‘Okay, we’re at that point where we can send them an email asking about placing a reorder.’ It’s much harder to do that without Shopify’s back-end system.”

Tip: Unified commerce is now essential for brand growth. Per one independent study, Shopify’s unified data model delivers up to 36% better total cost of ownership compared to other leading ecommerce platform providers.

11. Customer retention and loyalty programs

Customer retention programs work well for B2B—not just because they combat rising acquisition costs, but because buyers tend to value longer-term, stable relationships with their vendors. Per Forrester, loyal customers account for 61% of all B2B revenue. 

Proactively encouraging those repeat orders can lead to a sizable increase in revenue without the expensive marketing campaigns typically required to recruit new customers. 

Repeat buyers also require little investment to nurture, as B2B customer loyalty programs can be largely automated:

• Segment VIP buyers: Create segments inside Shopify to group VIP buyers by order size, purchasing frequency, or time since first purchase. Buyers automatically migrate into these dynamic segments when they fit the criteria. 
• Send automated emails: Trigger an email series to upsell or cross-sell related items a buyer would likely be interested in. Integrate Shopify segmentation data and customer profiles with an email marketing platform like Klaviyo, which can pull product data from your wholesale storefront to display these personalized recommendations. 
• Offer self-service options: Some 79% of B2B buyers prefer to place repeat orders online. A self-service checkout experience enables a rep-free repurchasing experience by displaying a wholesale customer’s order history, shipping address, and payment method in an online portal that’s accessible to stakeholders.

Technology stack for B2B ecommerce marketing

Your businesses’ infrastructure can hinder how effective your enterprise marketing campaigns are. The less time you spend on manual tasks, the lower the barrier to achieve marketing ROI. 

Core components of a B2B marketing tech stack include:

• Unified commerce platform: When everything operates from this single operating system, you don’t need to plug gaps with patchy middleware and extensive development costs that inflate technical debt and contribute to slower innovation. Everything is built on the same architecture by default. 
• CRM integration and data management: Personalized marketing lives and dies on the quality of customer data you’ve collected. At minimum, ensure your CRM integrates with your B2B ecommerce platform. Shopify’s built-in customer data platform (CDP) eliminates middleware and syncs buyer information automatically.
• Marketing automation software: Leverage customer data to create trigger-based automations with tools like Klaviyo or Shopify Flow. For instance, you could segment customers by purchase behavior and send an automated email to promote an exclusive new product to VIP buyers.
• Analytics tools: What actions do buyers take when they see your B2B marketing campaigns? Attribute ecommerce site traffic, sales, orders, and revenue to individual campaigns with a multichannel analytics platform like Shopify Analytics.

With the right systems in place, you can now measure how effectively each campaign moves key metrics—like pipeline growth, conversion rates, and customer acquisition cost (CAC).

Measuring B2B ecommerce marketing success

In B2B, sales cycles are long and decisions involve multiple stakeholders. Tracking marketing performance helps you target the right accounts, nurturing leads effectively, and improving ROI over time. 

Key performance indicators (KPIs) to track include:

• Target account engagement 
• MQL to SQL conversion rate
• Pipeline generated
• Customer acquisition cost
• Deal velocity

Measurement allows you to uncover what’s driving results, optimize your campaigns, and justify marketing spend. For example, if deals sourced from a social media campaign have a much longer sales cycle, examine the buyer journey for customers whose first touchpoint was that channel. Perhaps those prospects need more educational content or faster sales follow-up. 

Attribution modeling for B2B

Marketing attribution is notoriously difficult in B2B, where purchase decisions span several months. Cookie-based tracking technologies might have expired between the buyer’s first interaction to their final touchpoint, meaning you might think one channel is poorly performing. In reality, it should get some credit for influencing the deal in its early stages.

Multichannel attribution software solves this issue by tracking the end-to-end customer journey. For example, you might learn that most customers discover you through social media, then download a lead magnet and engage with personalized emails. This insight allows you to adjust budgets and double down on strategies that influence sales—not just those that immediately proceed a purchase. 

Tip: Shopify’s unified data model simplifies attribution by powering more than 60 prebuilt reporting dashboards that show how marketing campaigns contribute to revenue. Alternatively, create your own custom data explorations with ShopifyQL for easy referencing of your most important metrics.